Genius Bird | National Geographic

crows and ravens are the stuff of myths
and legends and according to some
scientists are among the smartest of
birds even more savvy than many mammals
when you watch them you kind of sense an
awareness and alertness then you watch
them some more and you see them play
engaging behaviors that that seem to be
made just for the fun of it dr. Baron
Heinrich of University of Vermont has
gone to great lengths to study these
fascinating birds more than a decade ago
he devised an experiment that
demonstrated that Ravens have the
ability to make logical connections much
like human beings
Heinrich tied meat to a string and
dangled it from a branch it was a
situation Ravens would never encounter
in the wild but as with this first timer
some Ravens figured out how to pull the
string in hoops and anchor it with their
claws until the meat was theirs
you couldn’t have learned it because I
didn’t train him he couldn’t have been
programmed to it to do it by evolution
through millions of years because in the
natural habitat you don’t have that and
it couldn’t have been random chance
because yet there are too many
individual steps so it was very
suggestive that the bird knew what it
was doing
Ravens exhibit other behavior that
suggests innate intelligence they will
hide food for later consumption and if
one Raven thinks another is watching it
will pretend to hide it in one place
while actually hiding it in another but
the hoard of food is found and stolen
it’s hard to outsmart a raven even for
another raven they are after all very
brainy birds